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Finally, the Full Force of The Who

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AFTER a year of almost continual touring, The Who have been taking a break these last weeks and, out of this respite, they've come up with a new single, The Seeker, and a new live album. Both are at the final‐mix stage and should be released within a month.

The Seeker is a Pete Town shend song, as Who singles hay e always been, and is a strange confusion; musically, it's nothing, just a rehash of the traditional Who tear‐up, loud and strong and brutal, another “Call Me Lightning” or “Magic Bus,” except that it's not as good. It does carry a certain excitement but the tune is tired and the whole sound has been done before, very many times. The more you hear it, the more you the staleness.

But if the music is a throw away, the lyrics are very ob viously meant. As in quite a few of Townshend's songs, notably “I Can See For Miles,” they're an odd mixture of arrogance and fright, half way between a boast and a confession:

This has always been Townshend's major problem as a writer, that lyrics come very much easier to him than original tunes and, in the past, he has taken time to get his melody lines up to standard. With The Seeker, however, he has been under great pressure from his rec ord labels, who have waited a year since the last Who single, and he's forced to slam it out regardless, warts and all. As Townshend him self admits, it's a waste.

There are no such difficul ties with the album. Quite simply, it is the best live rock album ever made, even stronger than the still‐unre leased “Rolling Stones Con cert,” currently circulating underground.

It was recorded at two con secutive shows in Hull and Leeds, tough Yorkshire towns that have been Who strong holds ever since the days of I can't explain, and features roughly the same act that the group used on its last Ameri can tour, except that it misses out “Tommy,” their opera. Apart from their old hits, “Substitute,” and “Happy Jack” and “I'm a Boy,” “Magic Bus” and “My Gen eration,” there is a John Ent whistle song (“Heaven and Hell”), a couple of songs off past albums (“Tattoo” and “Young Man's Blues”) and three revived rock classics from the fifties (“Fortune Teller,” “Summertime Blues” and “Shakin’ All Over”). Without exception, they are shatteringly loud, crude and vicious, entirely excessive. Without exception, they're

For the first time, the full force of the group has been caught on record, their un equaled ferocity and power. Somehow, whenever they've gone into the studio, they have softened up. The album of “Tommy,” for instance, is a whole different work from the opera live, much subtler, more complex and more orig inal but also slightly masked, held back, as though Town shend had suddenly been ashamed of all the obses sions and neuroses that pro duced his music in the first place and had tried to cover them up.

On the live album, though, there is no defensiveness at all. The sound is rough, the balance varies and some of the vocals verge on incoher ence. There are also bum notes and missed cues, screwed‐up harmonies and moments of general shambles and, finally, none of it mat ters in the least there is so much energy here, such de monic speed that any other standards are made meaning less. In the end, all that counts is the impact and that's quite shattering.

On “My Gerferation,” espe cially, Townshend lets fly with his full repertoire of gui tar assassination, the strings tortured against the amps, the neck smashed over his knee, the scream and howl of the feedback. It's flat‐out apoca lypse, just the way it used to be five years ago, when he wore his Union Jack jacket and used his guitar like a machine gun, turning it on his audience and slaughtering them one by one, his face white with fury.

Later on, a lot of that initial anger got ritualized. Dutifully smashing his guitar night after night, it became a bore, a piece of hokum. But in the beginning, the rage was real and now on this album, it sounds real again.

(The point about The Who's violence, the reason why it doesn't feel squalid, is that it carries such surprise and precision. Unlike the hard‐rock groups that have followed them, Blue Cheer or Led Zeppelin, say, they don't go in for slow mutilation, wrestling a song to the ground and then bludgeoning it and tearing it, stomping all over it, until it has been mashed beyond all recogni tion. Instead, their brutality is fast and total, like a one punch knockout or a clean kill in a bullfight. On its own terms, it carries elegance, range, humor and, yes, beauty.)

At any rate, Townshend himself seems very pleased with the album, all the more so because he's been going through a period of some con fusion. Obviously, the success of “Tommy” has brought him praise, prestige and, not least, money, but it has also left him directionless. On the one hand, he doesn't want to con tinue along the lines set down by “Tommy,” becoming more and more cerebral, more and more the pet poodle of the in tellectual critics; on the other hand, having knocked out a full‐length opera, it feels flat to go back to straightforward rock ‘n’ roll singles.

In fact, this problem has always existed Townshend is intelligent, creative, highly complex and much given to mystic ponderings, but the things that he values most in rock are its basic explosions, its noise and flash and image: Elvis Presley on his golden Cadillac, Mick Jagger doing the splits, Pete Townshend with his machine‐gun guitar. So he writes stuff like “Tom my,” sophisticated as it is, and he can see that it's good but, at the same time, he feels that it's a cop‐out from all the things that rock lives off, almost a betrayal. And he goes out on stage and he smashes his guitar, simple, mindless‐release. But then he gets his breath back and he knows that that's ‐ not it either, to deny his own brain. And so it goes on, round and

Meanwhile, of course, the listener is winning on both counts. With “Tommy,” he got rock's first formal mas terpiece and now, with the live album, he gets the defini tive hard‐rock holocaust.

A version of this archives appears in print on March 8, 1970, on Page M2 of the New York edition with the headline: Finally, the Full Force of The Who. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe